This is our chief work: it is to pray. To cry out to God for help, to offer him thanksgiving and praise. This is what we are to be about. And if anything takes precidence over this, it is idolatry. That's what the primordial sin was, in the garden of eden when they ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The essence of our sin, the sin of our parents, was basically to take control of their lives, apart from God.

St Paul is saying to the Church, you need to understand something important here- I don't want you to be unaware. There are not two different people of God, the Nation of Israel and then the Church. There is just one people of God. Israel is the Church and the Church is Israel, now some have been pruned out and others have been grafted in but there is one vine. God's work is of a whole cloth, the new is not new because it is a radical departure from the old or of a different species. The New is the Old but fulfilled. The purpose for the point in this passage is to say to the Corinthians that you are perfectly capable of repeating what they did and suffering the consequences.

A true, sacramental Christian marriage is the domestic church. It is the manifestation, between a man and a woman, of the bond of love which exists between the head and the body, between Jesus Christ and his Church. And a marriage, a godly marriage, functions and flourishes according to the same grace that governs how we, as the body of Christ, love our Head, Jesus Christ, in obedience. Authority, in the sense of servant-leadership, is foundational and necessary in all divinely appointed relationships. It even exists within the Godhead. And if a marriage is going to be godly, good, and beautiful, it will exist there as well.

The steward shrewdly uses mammon to obtain future security once he was cast out of his master's house. He made friends by reducing their debt. So that when he was thrown out he could go to them and they would give him a place to stay in return for the good deed he did for them. Jesus is saying that we should use mammon to make friends so that when we leave this world we will have an eternal home. Through the right relationship with things, we can achieve a right relationship with other people, and with God.

What we all want is to see the beauty of the Lord. But we can only see it in a state of holiness, the prophets speak of the beauty of holiness because the prophets were caught up and saw the beauty of the Lord. The pure in heart shall see God, St. John tells us. Our gradual taken from Psalm 34 says: "They had an eye unto him and were enlightened, and their faces were not ashamed". To be illumined is to gain the knowledge of God through encounter, and that encounter only comes through holiness.

It is not good for man to be alone- that is a practical and metaphysical declaration that God made clear from the very beginning of our existence. It is not good to be alone- and one can be alone even in a crowd. It is not good to go it alone. it is good to be in the sheepfold among the flock.

The enemy of our soul is the divider of the brethren, he plots and schemes as to how he can divide and fracture and tear asunder the unity of the brethren, this is his primary goal, if he can do this he has set the stage for the kill. We must be wise to his schemes, and not allow ourselves to be drawn into this trap, to be lured away from the sheepfold.

There are enemies all around whose sole purpose is to steal our peace by destroying our gentle and tranquil spirit. They have all kinds of tricks and weapons to incite us to anger and agitation. But the truth is, we are our own worst enemies because they can do nothing to us without our cooperation. At the end of the day our enemy does not take our peace away, we give forfeit it. We must not engage in things that will disturb that peace. Not only must we avoid doing things that trouble our tranquility be must also actively guard it. We are in fact engaged in a war to maintain peace.

We have work to do. We have come a long way, God has been so gracious to us, but we have work to do. The absolute meaning of our life, our very existence is to feed on god by offering the sacrifice, by offering ourselves in the sacrifice of the lamb, and then going out into the world in the spirit of power to live holy lives and to draw all men to god. Todays Feast of the Body of Christ, Corpus Christie, this is the feast of great joy and satiation, because our hunger has been satisfied with angels food, the bread of heaven, the flesh of God made Man, there should be no greater joy for us. This is how we feast, we should pull out all the stops. We need to learn how to feast. We need to learn how to rejoice and give thanks.

And it's not just something that happens spontaneously, you realize that feasting requires asceticism and discipline every bit as much as fasting does? We fast so that we can offer the sacrifice with purity of heart, we feast so that we can offer the sacrifice in joy. But they're both so that we can offer the sacrifice.